The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain, review: 'pitch perfect'

For Gustav Perle, the protagonist of this novel, life is a matter of restraint, self-control and, above all, neutrality. “You have to be like Switzerland,” urges his mother in the opening pages. “You have to hold yourself together and be courageous, stay separate and strong. Then, you will have the right kind of life.” Growing up in Switzerland after the Second World War, in a tiny flat with his unloving mother, Gustav wants very badly to have the right kind of life – a life, for example, like the one that belongs to his classmate Anton Zweibel.

Anton is volatile where Gustav is staid, rich where Gustav is poor, talented where Gustav is slow (Anton’s a twitchy piano prodigy; Gustav is calm but can barely write) and his parents are welcoming and jolly where Gustav’s mother is rigid and anxious. Anton is also Jewish, a fact that prompts a strange reaction in Mrs Perle. “The Jews,” she explains furiously, “are the people your father died trying to save.”

This is the set-up for Rose Tremain’s 13th novel, which turns the unpromising complexities of Swiss neutrality into something adventurous and captivating. In a three-movement structure studded with linked motifs and themes – mimicking the sonata of the title – Tremain plays clever variations with the ideas of distancing and self-denial. The novel’s second section looks back to Switzerland in the years before the war, where the 20-year-old Emilie, Gustav’s mother-to-be, seduces and marries Erich Perle, the town’s assistant chief of police. “She hopes that all the rumours people are spreading about German aggression will subside – like the storm that never breaks – and everything and everyone will be left in peace.”

Instead, her husband is caught up with increasing agitation over an Überjudung, “an over-concentration of Jews, for whom Swiss society has little use”. When he is ordered to stop letting Jewish refugees into the country, he is forced to choose between his instinct for non-involvement and the demands of compassion and morality. His decision costs him his marriage, and in the book’s concluding section, set in the Nineties, Tremain flashes forward to consider the effects of these events on Gustav and Anton, middle-aged men whose lives have been sculpted by the decisions of their parents.

Although it revolves around another conflict and another period of history, the questions raised by Tremain feel intensely topical: when does neutrality become cowardice? Who is responsible for the displaced? One character suggests, with a straight face, that Swiss thought and policy should imitate a coconut: “The shell is hard and fibrous, difficult to penetrate. It protects the nourishing flesh and milk inside.” Closer to the sharp end of policy, however, the policeman Erich can’t hide behind metaphor: “We strive for indifference. As members of the police we are taught to feel it. But is not indifference a moral crime?”

The character of Emilie (another in a long procession of female characters onto whose small lives and selfish compulsions Tremain shines light) is also a brilliantly soft-pedalled study of how poverty and unhappiness can breathe life into ungenerous political doctrines. “He put Jewish lives before mine,” thinks Emilie of her husband. “He cared more about helping strangers than he cared about me.”

This is also a book about friendship and longing, unsentimentally told and bleakly precise. In its stately final section, we learn that the upshot of Gustav’s lifetime of emotional continence and self-mastery has been a strange, sexless existence: weary, jaded, with an “intolerable pain in his heart”, he has ended up not so much neutral as neutered. His mother’s miniature selfishnesses have made her “so angry and sorrowful for so long, so impossible to love or even to please”.

Anton’s attempts to impose order on his own existence have left him more fragile and yearning than ever. But from this tangled mess of human relations, Tremain draws a conclusion that is simultaneously straightforward and sweetly transformative. Like so much else in this compassionate and musical novel, it hits a perfect note.